Like Narcissus who died through being consumed by self-obsession, postcolonial critique is dazzled by the perverse logic of colonial value despite wanting to separate from it.
Joseph Tonda centres his study on African societies and their diasporic communities to describe a global tortured, torturing human state from which there appears to be no escape. His metanarrative establishes that we are all entangled as victims.
Colonial languages need to be brought into conversation with indigenous languages in anticolonial or decolonial praxis. It is in the process of translation that colonized subjects begin to find themselves.
Those experiencing rejection because of their sociopolitical identities can know that God does not condone discrimination, that God’s promises are a proclamation of reversal.
Even in the midst of an empire that crucifies the innocent for political gain, despair is not warranted. Instead, there is work to be done.
A truly progressive society is one that is able to feel the wounds and pain of the most marginalized and excluded. Such a society’s task, consequently, is to heal and anoint the wounded. Perhaps, that task is better undertaken by embracing the work of mourning.
If Christ is King, he takes on that role in order to subvert dominant understandings of power and its exercise. Christ turns power and kingship upside down and uses them for new and much more creative and life-giving purposes.
Achille Mbembe’s work excavates the legacies of colonial reason and violence shaping the powers of death in the world today.